Ben Lincoln - About This Website

Ben Lincoln

I am the "I" being referred to in most cases when something is written in the first person on this site.

I've worked in the technology industry since 1994, when I was in high school and got a job doing Macromedia Director work for a small company in my hometown which produced multimedia CDs. I've also worked as a UI developer at an internet startup before they were called dot-coms (Intermind, for those with long memories), a systems admin for a student newspaper at Simon Fraser University (where I studied electronic music composition), and most recently as a systems engineer for a large retail corporation in Seattle (where I was born).

Aside from my duties as a computer nerd, I like to explore the real world, which you can read about in the Drives section. I enjoy a lot of music - particularly industrial, darkwave, and metal. Some of my favourite bands are The Birthday Massacre, Psyclon Nine, The Deathstars, In Love and War, Skinny Puppy, Collide, Switchblade Symphony, Front Line Assembly, a whole slew of late 80s/early 90s industrial bands, and Evanescence. I also like a lot of what black metal bands like Arcturus and Dimmu Borgir have done, although not everything.

I like the sort of out of control drum and bass that groups such as Orange Dust produce, and consider breakcore projects like Duran Duran Duran (three "Duran"s, not the 80s band - not linked from this article because most pages about Duran Duran Duran are NSFW) to be the modern equivalent of 80s/90s industrial such as Skinny Puppy. I also have a soft spot for classical/symphonic/soundtrack music and the sort of hip-hop that sounds like it was made by people who liked the soundtracks of the Metroid videogames as much as I did (Tech N9ne's "Snake Ya", Three Six Mafia et al's "Move B**ch"^[1], and so on).

I have four tattoos - a barcode on my right forearm, Kain's clan symbol (from the Legacy of Kain series) on my left upper arm, Schröedinger's wavefunction equation on my left forearm, and the symbol I designed for my photography project on my right upper arm. I think of them as reminders to myself and advertisements to others of particularly strong aspects of my personality - I am very interested in science (and particularly the eerie aspects of quantum physics), I am clearly particularly fond of Legacy of Kain, and was strongly influenced by cyberpunk fiction like Neuromancer and Blade Runner.

Speaking of books, although I haven't had much time to read recently I quite enjoy William Gibson (particularly the aforementioned Neuromancer), Greg Bear (especially Anvil of Stars), Neal Stephenson, Alastair Reynolds (probably the best modern hard science fiction author), Pat Cadigan, and Bruce Sterling. For non-fiction, I recommend David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality and anything by Brian Greene.

A Few Older Photos of Me

2002

2004-2006 (Photo by Peter Kwon)

Exploring Ape Cave in 2005

2006

At Yellowstone's Wraith Falls in 2006

I don't have any really recent photos of myself, but I still have a shaved head and wear more black clothes than most people.

Footnotes

1.	Note: not the Ludacris track of the same name.

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